Dust on Spines

Each volume holds its breath on the shelf, a weight of leather, cloth, and numbered pages— the spine a thin meridian between worlds, collecting what the air forgets to name. Light doesn't reach here much anymore. The dust moves slow, settling like sediment in the bottom of a lake no one visits, each particle a whisper of the room's own decay. A finger trailing across leather spine writes a brief autobiography: where it was read, where it was left, the slow forgetting that feels like devotion. The books don't mind. They've always known that every word survives by being buried— pressed flat, held tight, kept in the dark, waiting for a hand that remembers their names. And when the spines split, when the glue finally surrenders to time's small mathematics, the pages scatter like a final correspondence no one was supposed to find.